


Needle Song

by eldvarpa



Series: Fëanorians beyond the First Age (AUs) [22]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:02:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26396107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldvarpa/pseuds/eldvarpa
Summary: Celebrimbor and Maglor disagree on how to handle the Sauron problem (in the aftermath, they agree).
Relationships: Celebrimbor & Curufin, Celebrimbor & Maglor
Series: Fëanorians beyond the First Age (AUs) [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1066016
Comments: 4
Kudos: 45





	Needle Song

“What do you intend to do?” Maglor asked from the other side of the desk - Celebrimbor's own desk in his own workshop, which had been full of people coming and going only a couple of weeks earlier. _Before_. Before it became known that Sauron himself was ready to march on the town, and not to pay them a friendly visit. 

Celebrimbor tore his gaze away from his uncle. He caught the glint of the Three with the corner of his eye, and was compelled to turn towards them. He had been so proud of them, so so childishly proud. He could barely stand their perfection now, knowing who had taught him the technique to make them. 

The Three were just his Doom catching up with him, at last. 

He had been thinking of sending them away, entrusting them to somebody else, so that Sauron wouldn't get them, if it was his last victory, but he couldn't bring himself to part with them. 

Maglor sweeping suddenly into his town, his house and his mind didn't make things any easier. 

Maglor was part of his Doom, too. 

Celebrimbor looked up again, but didn't look at Maglor. 

He focused on the strange wooden box Maglor had set down on the desk between them. 

A barrier or a bridge, Celebrimbor couldn't tell.

The box was white, with a glint to it that he was sure was due to more than excellent wood-carving skills. Its corners were rounded. It had an elongated, slightly asymmetrical handle on one side and a needle lay on top of it, across three oval depressions lined up along its length. 

Both the handle and the needle had to be made of some sort of crystal.

“Not 'some sort of crystal',” Maglor's voice sliced through Celebrimbor's musings. Loud musings, apparently. “Silima, Tyelperinquar, silima.”

“Silima?” Celebrimbor echoed, dully.

“This is the counterpart to the Silmarils,” Maglor replied, his voice taking on an openly irritated edge. “Do you think your grandfather made the Silmarils just for idle contemplation?”

Celebrimbor clenched his fists. He had never before heard his uncle speak so harshly to someone. Scathingly, really. He didn't think he deserved his uncle's scorn. 

“Or do you actually believe your grandfather wanted to preserve the light of Valinor for the valar's sake?” Maglor blustered on, and at the same time took hold of the tip of the needle and straightened it. 

With the needle out of the way, Celebrimbor could easily see what the three depressions were meant to house. 

“What is this then?” he asked.

“This is an instrument for music-making.”

“Music?”

“Music springing from the power of the Silmarils,” Maglor clarified. “It is an idea Father and I came up with during a stay at the edge of the Unknown. You never saw that boundary did you? Where the valar and the maiar didn't tread and everything seemed possible. We began to wonder if we might be able to catch the Music and do something with it.”

“Catch _the_ Music? And do what?” 

Maglor shrugged. “Maybe make another Music of our own. Breach the borders of the Unknown, create a new world – our world – from scratch. Is it not the valar's own belief, that the Silmarils can re-make this world at the end of days?”

“Do you think you can match Eru's power?” 

“How do you know this is not the way Eru intends for this world to move on?”

“Bullshit,” Celebrimbor spat, uncaring – for a moment – if his uncle replied with even more scorn. “And anyway, what does this have to do with me now?”

Maglor smiled. 

Maglor's smile, the lack of feeling behind it, reminded Celebrimbor of Sauron himself.

“You need a way out of your predicament, don't you? You're trapped here.” Maglor gestured towards the rings, still smiling. “Annatar's gift.”

Celebrimbor bit the corner of his mouth.

“I have not had an opportunity to test its power yet, but I've been experimenting with it ever since I retrieved my Silmaril. It does still play, even with just one gem, though its power may not be the same,” Maglor went on to explain, quite blithely. “The twins carved the box. They considered it their greatest work, and took loving care of it while they lived. While they fought to retrieve the Silmarils.”

“How --...how does it even make Music?” Celebrimbor ventured.

Maglor lowered a hand to the one of the pouches attached to his belt. The Silmaril rose out of it like a sun. The mere sight of it elicited a shiver from Celebrimbor, and – if he had to be honest – it was a shiver of excitement rather than fear or disgust or whatever emotion all the upstanding elves out there would have considered proper. 

Maglor placed the Silmaril in the middle depression. 

“I could play it without moving my hands too, but it is somewhat tiring, and my journey here was long.”

Maglor hovered one hand above the lop-sided handle and slid the other into the space above the Silmaril. 

He curled his fingers and sound like that of a violin or a cello filled the room. Keeping his fingers curled, he adjusted their position over the box. Then he started moving his other hand over the handle and the sound smoothed into something else. 

Something more rounded, richer.

Like a voice. 

Like a voice raised in heart-breaking singing.

It was high-pitched, feminine at first, but Maglor kept changing the position of his fingers and the voice gradually darkened.

It became heavier, but still mellow, limpid.

Like his father's voice.

Maglor played with his eyes closed. His right hand curled and uncurled, tensed and relaxed, coaxing sound from thin air. His left hand rose and fell, the fingers spread out to pluck at invisible strings, and just like that Curufin's voice filled his son's workshop in Ost-in-Edhil where he had never been and could never be. 

Celebrimbor couldn't stand it.

He had not heard his father's voice in so long.

His father's voice had been so beautiful, when raised in song. 

His father's voice was ringing in his ears.

His dead father's voice was coiling around him. 

“Stop!” Celebrimbor cried.

He covered his ears with his hands and stood up, the chair screeching behind him and rattling to the floor.

“Stop this!” 

The music went on.

“Stop!”

At last, Maglor pulled his hands away from the instrument and opened his eyes.

“Leave.” Celebrimbor's chest heaved. His hands were curled around his ears, but not pressed to them. Slowly, clumsily, he lowered his arms. He was trembling. “I don't want your help. I don't want...this.”

Maglor slowly removed the Silmaril from the instrument. “You will die, _if_ you are lucky.”

“Then so be it!” Celebrimbor almost screamed. “I don't want anything to do with you or the Silmaril or father.” 

Celebrimbor turned and walked to the window, steadied himself with his hands on the sill.

Maglor was silent for a long while, but Celebrimbor sensed that he would speak again.

Maglor pinned his back with his eyes like daggers, then delivered his words like a killing stroke. 

“You deserve to suffer, Tyelperinquar.” Maglor's voice was matter-of-fact. “You deserve to suffer, for turning your back on your father, for turning your back on the help we are offering you. But remember this: only your father can save you, and you _will_ beg him to come and save you.”

Celebrimbor clung more desperately to the sill. 

Maglor left without making a sound, but Celebrimbor could tell he was gone when his hands stopped shaking.

He half-expected to see Maglor out on the streets, but the streets were empty, dead. 

When he turned towards the desk again, his Three were gone. 

*

He had never imagined pain could be so everything.

He had never imagined it could last for so long.

But Maglor was not entirely wrong: his father did rescue him, in a way.

When Sauron kept asking about the Three and it seemed like the pain would never end, his mind was filled only with images of his father. 

There was his father in the smithy in their home, their favourite home, the one in the hills north of Tirion, teaching him. 

Curufin was always so serious in the forge, and Celebrimbor would often wonder why, as a child. Curufin was also always calm and patient, gentle and nurturing as a father should be, even though he had been still so busy being a son himself. 

There was his father's warmth in the darkness of the journey. 

His father's arms wrapped around him on the ship that dipped and soared, his father's embrace like an armour protecting him from the darkness and the screams of their friends, whose bodies they sailed through. His father always kept him close, always held him when the journey allowed for it. Celebrimbor could not have said how many hours he spent clinging to his father's chest, burrowed, safe, _almost_ happy. 

Silence was all there was after Grandfather died. Silence that made Celebrimbor feel like throwing up, because he knew his father should have been crying. Celebrimbor would have cried if his father had died, but Curufin just stared, at something Celebrimbor could only guess at and didn't wish to picture. 

The bitter tears were indeed his own when he learnt of his father's death. He never wanted his father to die, he had parted ways with him, but he didn't really want to lose him, not like that. His father's death didn't come as a surprise, but he wasn't ready when the news reached him, and there was no embrace to shield him from it, no warmth. 

Through his tears, through his pain, he could still glimpse his father's smile in Himlad, always tinged with sadness but filled with determination, a smile brightening the long nights and days they had spent together, trying to come up with something that could make them win the war.

And then there was a scream, and it was not a scream that came from him because his screams had long since died down, because he had no voice for them anymore. 

He tried to look, despite the hollow of his left eye. 

Everything around him was red. 

The sky was freshly spilled blood and it oozed down, thickened and clotted into a giant seething pool, a trap. 

The orcs were engulfed in an instant.

Sauron screamed again. 

Their gazes met as the blood fastened to him and pulled him down. 

Sauron thrashed and flailed, but the blood didn't let go. As he began to sink, a single right arm rose from the blood and wrapped around his neck, securing his defeat.

All through it, Curufin's voice sang, tearing into Sauron on his and his son's behalf. 

After Sauron disappeared, the blood sky and the blood earth did too. Celebrimbor fell on cold stone, swaddled in pain. In his mind, because he couldn't move his body, he curled up. His father's voice was still all around him, and to him Curufin was there in the flesh and cradled him, telling him everything would be fine. 

*

“Have you found him?” Celebrimbor asked the moment Zirak entered.

Zirak shook her head at him, crossed the room and set the tray with his lunch down on the table next to his bed. 

“Please, you must find him,” Celebrimbor said, trying to sit up, which awoke every half-mended broken bone and dislocated joint and half-sealed-up wound on his body.

“Shh, friend-of-my-father, calm down,” Zirak cooed, gently laying her hands on his shoulders. “It's just a matter of time before we find your uncle. Trust me, we have our ways.”

Celebrimbor tried to breathe in slowly, while Zirak adjusted his pillows so that he could sit without hurting himself. She lit more lamps, kindling a bit of cheer in his sickroom deep in the heart of Khazad-Dûm. Sitting next to his bed, she talked to him while she helped him eat, about how Sauron was truly gone and how they were hunting down his orcs, every last one of them. 

Celebrimbor was grateful that Dwarves had found him and not elves. He was immensely grateful, because he could be honest with the Dwarves, with Narvi's daughter whom he'd known since she was just a tiny baby in a jewel-studded crib and then an inquisitive child skittering about her father's workshop.

He could tell her, over and over, that he needed to see Maglor, talk to him again.

He waited, as the days rolled into one another, overlapped and lay the foundations for something new. 

Zirak visited him often. 

The healers too visited him often, sometimes on their own, sometimes with craftsmen who were adamant they would make replacements for his left arm and his left eye, and maybe would even find a way to make him walk properly again. 

Zirak's children came, and told or read him stories from their tomes, and it didn't matter if Celebrimbor knew those stories already, because each one of them made each story sound completely new. 

Zirak's children's children came and wanted stories from him. They asked him questions about his earlier life, about Valinor and about Beleriand. Sometimes they sang for him in return, when the memories became too much. 

He fell asleep, one day, during one such song.

Song still filled the room when he woke up, but the language was different.

Celebrimbor almost dared not open his eye to look. Tears welled up in it, but the song was one that did not allow for tears. Typical of his uncle to convey mourning without the angst. Come to think of it, he didn't remember ever seeing Maglor cry. 

When the song ended, Maglor came into view. 

“Tyelperinquar,” he called, leaning over from his chair next to the bed. “I'm sorry.” 

Something grave hovered over Maglor's sharp, unblemished face, but it wasn't as menacing as the day they had last met. 

“I should not have let this happen to you.”

Surprised, Celebrimbor mumbled a reply that it was okay. He had refused Maglor's help after all, and Maglor had saved him nonetheless.

Maglor made a disagreeing noise. “I have spoken to Zirak, she spared no details of the state they found you in. Your father would kill me for it, and so would your mother. And your grandfather. And uncle Nelyo. _All_ of your uncles, but uncle Nelyo in particular.”

“You killed Sauron. Uncle Nelyo can only be happy.”

Maglor's eyes went to the instrument that had played Sauron's defeat, which he had placed next to Celebrimbor's medicine and the leftovers of his lunch. 

Celebrimbor saw it too, and suddenly he heard again – in his mind, but vividly, as if he could touch it – his father's voice. 

Maglor wiped away the tears that did spill from his eye then. 

His touch was cold, fragile.

Celebrimbor started, and almost recoiled from it. “What happened to your hand?”

“Hands,” Maglor corrected, lifting both his hands to the light of a lamp that hung above the bed. “They're not pretty, are they?” His hands were covered in wrinkles, the skin stretched thin with veins clearly visible beneath it, like a very old mortal's hands. “Maybe it was too much power for the body of an elf to wield. Or maybe I had to put too much of myself in the music since there was not enough of the Silmarils.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Sorry?” Maglor almost laughed. “You didn't steal the Silmarils from us. Besides, I'm still better off than you are.” He cast a meaningful glance at Celebrimbor's missing eye and the mess that was his face.

“But you had to use the instrument for me.”

“I would have had to use it regardless, sooner or later.”

“Does it –...did it spread –” 

Maglor rolled a sleeve up, showing his forearm. “The rest of me seems to be fine, for now. I told you, I'm much better off than you are.”

The healers came in then, chased Maglor from his chair and carried out their routine examinations and checks 

“Uncle,” Celebrimbor called when they were gone. “Will you stay with me?”

Maglor returned to the chair and was silent for a while. 

“I have abandoned my kin,” he said at last.

“But not those of your blood.”

Maglor didn't reply to that.

“I don't want to go back, either. They probably believe me dead anyway.”

Maglor kept quiet.

Celebrimbor didn't know what to make of his uncle's silence. Part of him expected a refusal, and he was not going to accept it.

“Uncle,” he called, more urgently. “I have been thinking.”

“About what?”

“About how to take the third Silmaril back from the sky.”

Maglor lifted an eyebrow in surprise, but his dark eyes glinted. “You would do that?”

“I need more of father's voice, but not as a weapon.” Celebrimbor stole a glance at the instrument. “I need...more than father's voice.”

Their gazes met over said instrument. 

Their thoughts too came together, entwined until they were one and the same. 

“Yes,” Maglor sighed. “I had been planning to play it to bring them back. Now I'm not sure if the valar are alerted to the fact that I can lock a maia away in a separate world and will stop me if I try to interfere with their own realms. But perhaps with two Silmarils it would be easier to do it, and it might be possible to catch them by surprise.”

Celebrimbor took some time to parse his uncle's words. “You think Sauron isn't dead?”

“I have no idea, honestly. Probably killing him would have been easier, but since I was at it, I decided to...test if and how moving to another dimension works. From here to a place that is beyond here, like the Halls of the dead.” Celebrimbor nodded along. “Even if he's alive, I don't think he can come back. That world doesn't follow the same rules as this one.”

“Do you still have my Three?”

“Yes,” Maglor replied simply. No apologies or anything for taking them. “Do you want them back?”

Celebrimbor didn't have to think about it. “No, not now.”

“They helped, you know. I wore them while I played.” _While Sauron was torturing you for them _went unsaid. “They resounded well with the Silmaril and the music, I think. Let me fetch them.”__

__Maglor made to stand. Celebrimbor's _left_ arm shot up from under the bed and caught his arm in a grip that was firm and strong. _ _

__“I said I don't want them now.” Maglor froze, but not because of what he said. Celebrimbor followed Maglor's gaze to his brand new prosthetic.“How surprised would people be if they knew the Doors of this kingdom aren't the first great collaboration between an elf and a dwarf?”_ _

__Maglor roamed his eyes over the silvery arm and hand that went – ironically – well with Celebrimbor's name. While the decorations were starkly different, the shape was exactly the same as that of the prosthetic Curufin had made for Maedhros, with the help of the Dwarves of Belegost, the hand that had been holding onto the Silmaril and didn't burn even when Maedhros jumped._ _

__“You said it, didn't you? That Father would save me.”_ _

__“I did say that.” Maglor took Celebrimbor's arm between his withered hands and inspected it. Celebrimbor could almost see the memories overlapping over the prosthetic. Finally, Maglor kissed it. “Maybe I'm not that much better off than you are, after all. Ingenuity holds its own even next to the most powerful music.”_ _

__“...and I had to go and waste all of my ingenuity by trusting a maia.”_ _

__“You were definitely naïve, yes.”_ _

__Celebrimbor managed a half-smile. He cocked his head towards the instrument. “By the way, what is it called?”_ _

__“Therelin.”_ _

__“Needle-Song,” Celebrimbor rolled the name on his tongue, its sweet sound harbouring a threat and the ever-present shadow of Míriel. “Of course.” He lowered his eyes for an instant than quickly caught Maglor's gaze again. “Will you play it for me?”_ _

__“Not now.”_ _

__“Just music, nothing else.”_ _

__“You are not in any condition to listen to _that_ music.”_ _

__“But –”_ _

__“Don't argue Tyelperinquar,” Maglor commanded, though he did not put much power to it – yet. “Your friend Zirak also made it very clear that I was not to upset you in any way, unless I wish to be kicked out of her home. You don't want that to happen, do you?”_ _

__Celebrimbor actually pouted. “...Fine.”_ _

__“This time we're doing things my way.”_ _

**Author's Note:**

> A theremin-like instrument is definitely THE sort of musical instrument Maglor and his father would come up with. (Also Maglor + Fëanorian theremin could be a pretty dark Maglor.)
> 
>  **Epilogue A** (because I was in a good mood):
> 
> Elrond's eyes nearly fell to the floor as they settled on his father.
> 
> Then he looked up. 
> 
> The night sky looked unchanged: a sliver of spring moon, minor stars, and the Star of Hope shining where he would have expected it to shine, familiar. 
> 
> “You...?” he trailed off, unsure what to say or think. Could he even trust the man in front of him, after all that had happened with Celebrimbor and Annatar?
> 
> “They pulled me down by means of a magnet of sorts, I didn't quite understand,” Eärendil spoke.
> 
> Elrond frowned. “They?”
> 
> Eärendil smirked. “People you know.”
> 
> Elrond's mind made a beeline for the truth: there were not that many people he knew that might want to drag Eärendil down from the sky. The Silmaril, more precisely.
> 
> “And that?” Elrond said, pointing up.
> 
> “That's just a lingering echo. It prevented general panic and...might buy them time, I guess.”
> 
> “Time?”
> 
> Eärendil came forward and cupped Elrond's face, the face of the adult man who had replaced the face of the teen he had met, once, several hundred years earlier. 
> 
> “Yes, time.” Time sounded like a heap of possibilities now. Eärendil was going to spend his time with his son now, instead of travelling the night-sky on behalf of the Valar to do work they should be doing. His son and he could do a myriad things together, freely, for as long as they wanted. He pulled Elrond in an embrace. “Time to get their fathers back too.”
> 
> **Epilogue B**
> 
> Curufin has a lot of things to _say_ to Maglor's face.


End file.
